miércoles, 5 de junio de 2013

Mandriva 2013...What it might look like

Because of all the problems that Mandriva experienced, many people have assumed that the distro is quite dead by now. However, the foundation OpenMandriva has been busy gathering infrastructure, collecting historical releases, organizing teams and basically, doing everything that they must not to let the distro that freed many from Redmond's OS disappear.

There have been tense moments (both externally and internally) and lines had to be drawn, a process that aimed at being constructive, but resulted a painful one nonetheless.

Decisions were made and not everyone was pleased. The list includes a name for the foundation, its identifying visual signs, the official release of the distro and, more recently, the name of the distribution. For some, it was Moondrake, for others, Mandriva; today, we know it has been called OpenMandriva (just like the foundation).

Although not many people talked about this, there was an official alpha released and I decided to install it to a VM to see what it offers. These are my findings:

Installation
Same installer that we have known (I was relieved to see the infamous "crazy penguin"!) and there were no problems there. However, one new feature is that it puts GRUB 2 on your system to boot it up.

Login Screen
A bit more elegant and polished than the one on Mandriva 2011

Desktop
The ROSA SimpleWelcome, Rocket Bar, etc, seem to have come to stay. They are more polished, though.

Default wallpaper ("Moondrake")

A Wallpaper I added to test different elements

The ROSA SimpleWelcome. It covers your wallpaper

A broom appears if you want to clean your recently accessed files (convenient)

The applications tab. Not many programs here yet

Time Frame
This includes the new characteristics that the ROSA distribution sports. Now it has to sections (My Local Documents and Social Networking Sites) that become ready for use after you activate Nepomuk.

Nepomuk did a great job at picking the files I used

When I first saw the ROSA stuff in Mandriva 2011, I did not like it. However, the Timeframe eventually made me like the concepts because it is a beautiful and convenient way to navigate your documents. This version is improved; the Timeframe looks cleaner as you can play with the drop down menu for My Local Documents.

The second part, however, is not something I like but I know many people who would fall in love with it: Social Networking. I have never been a fan of social networking sites. However, I set up a Facebook account that I have and never use to see how Timeframe would work with it. The process was quite simple.

You just click on the corresponding icon to get started

The last silliness someone shared jumps in front of your eyes

You can share your own silliness, too!

I must say that OpenMandriva worked very well with all the ROSA stuff. Of course, this is not a review (it's not wise to review Alphas!), but a simple exploration of a curious Linux user who is still saving a partition for a distro that he cannot abandon... Too many good memories, I guess.

After all, I became a Linux user thanks to Mandriva. I hope the OpenMandriva team can manage to save the distro that showed me that a different computer paradigm is possible.

I've been busy with moving, attending to a sick girl friend and other real life issues lately, combine it with terminated job contract, awkward and retarded neophyte politics and what not, my activity and motivation has hit an all time low lately.. :|

My gf is going away this weekend, I'll try see if I can prepare and put the final touches on my/the official beta for me to label it as satisfactory for a beta (it kinda was a couple of months ago, but then everything turned less than sane & bright)..

Hopefully I can get things synced up without too much hazzle or annoyances with certain people who thinks the number of times they can make commits with the message "cleaned up spec" is what builds a distro (or rather making it a true pain to merge and stay on top of with current state of affairs..) and provides the rights to hijack the project...

3. Top 1 Rescue Distro:SimplyMepis! When something goes truly wrong, you can always count on this Linux distribution to rescue the system, get into the Web, modify files and make back ups. All that without mentioning it is almost easier to use than Windows ;-)